Festive Franchising: How to Market your Franchise Around Christmas

It may not be December yet but Christmas is just around the corner and with many people going out to buy presents now before the big festive rush, you as a franchise owner need to start thinking about it.

Maximising your Franchises Christmas Potential

Christmas is by far the most highly anticipated and costly holiday of the year’s calendar here in the UK and, with so many people competing to bring customer to their stores, how can you possibly stick out from the crowd?

Christmas Marketing

Whether you think it’s too late or too early to start thinking about your marketing activities on the run up to Christmas, we recommend that you stop what you are doing and start planning now. Marketing isn’t just what ad are you planning to run, it’s the whole strategic process of how you are planning to sell your products or services during this time.

They’re many famous Christmas marketing activities, you only have to look as far as the big companies to see how much effort it they put in; with celebrities like James Corden advertising for Sainsburys, you can see that the big companies know just how much a good campaign can be for your company.

It is likely that, as a franchisee, you won’t have the budget to support a celebrity guest, but it doesn’t mean you can’t do something effective around Christmas. As most franchisees will only prioritise their own territory, national brand awareness isn’t something they need to concern themselves with, thus bringing down the cost substantially.

Exactly what you should do will depend on a few critical variables:

Target Market

Territory Size

Cost of Product/Service

Franchise Target Market

The target market of your franchise will influence the sentiment attached to your campaign. If you are looking to target parents with children, then you need to appeal to both parties in order to attract them. An example might be for a franchise like We Make Footballers to offer a free Christmas game for children in their territory. This can then be added with a surprise Christmas gift for all attendants to set that lasting memory for them to hopefully return in the new year.

Franchise Territory Size

A franchise’s territory size will impact how you market around Christmas - using the above example for We Make Footballers; in a large territory could be very expensive to cover the whole region. If you have a larger area and cannot focus on something that targets individuals, then perhaps something that just appeals to the Christmas spirit will be more financially appealing. An example for this can be something like Esquires Coffee replacing their normally sweets & treats with Christmas-themed treats. This might not bring in a truck load of new customers but might be the difference of a customer just coming in for a coffee, to a customer adding a Christmas treat to their order, to join in with the festivities.

Cost of Product/Service

It is understood that, on average, the higher the price for a product and/or service, the lower number of customers you should expect. This influences the best way to market as having an addon free gift of some kind for a product/service that only sells 10 per day, wouldn’t break the bank. If you were a Vending Franchise though, then adding on anything to a single purchase would be seriously costly.

Overall a specific type of Christmas marketing doesn’t work for every franchise, each model will need to think about a custom Christmas marketing campaign that would suit them. By all means you can use inspiration from other marketing activities you’ve seen, but be sure to apply it to be specific to your franchise.